"Unless you have a smaller population than I'm expecting that probably won't get you anywhere. Our name consistency is that our first names all have the syllable 'bel' in them, middle names if applicable have an M and an R sound in that order, and surnames if derived from the standard parent set mean 'Swan'; but I can't even show you what the standard girl face looks like - computer's broken illusions are broken I suck at drawing - and it's also not guaranteed to be a face we've seen before - Kib's planet has reincarnation and in his past life he was a girl but didn't look like the other girl ones of us."

"Our population is indeed far too large to go off that. I could tell you that you're not anyone notable in this kingdom but there are many, and besides it'd be really deeply unwise to be notable and it sounds like you'd take that seriously."

"The results I'd expect from a me growing up here are 'unremarkable citizen' and 'dead somewhere between the ages of six and seventeen', yes."

"Let's hope there isn't one. Edda's this world?"

"Yeah. Edda's crowded. All the worlds we've found so far are inhabited but Edda's the one with literally hundreds of sapient species all scattered around and it has a lot of tech and magic variety but it's poorly integrated so there's lots to do bringing it to the random underdeveloped civilizations too backwater for anyone else to have bothered with. Loki's magic is called sorcery, it's the gibberish encyclopedia thing. She is unique among Bells in having parents but not the usual set; her biological parents are the king and queen of a frost giant planet, and then her adoptive mother decided to kidnap and raise the frost giant princess under an illusion to make her look Asgardian instead with a view towards eventually ending the war with a puppet queen inculcated with Asgardian values on the frost giant throne. Loki's, uh, sort of cooperating with the broad strokes of this plan at this time in the sense that she does mean to wind up ruling the frost giants and ending the ancestral war between the two planets. Loki's also coming up on two millennia old, Asgardians - and she was very convincingly passed off as one to everyone including herself for a long time - age really really slowly."

Nod. 

"So far there's this pattern that most Bells - but not this one or this one -" he taps Hex and Aurum, "that one stayed home and this one it was her daughter instead, but most of us somehow wind up in an Arda, and then contribute to ending the war with the local Melkor. Loki's was this one -" He draws in Elentári. "But to finish the job she had to write her teleportation spell to get back to Edda and pick up a thing called the Tesseract, which is one of a family of six artifacts which do scary shit but will totally kill you if you pick one up and it doesn't like you. The Tesseract likes her, so she grabbed it and killed Elentári's Melkor. She also cleaned up the mess I wound up making in Space Arda for me about which I would prefer not to go into further detail it is not a secret I just don't like talking about it and there's no one else here to pass the buck to. Uh, Space Arda is similar in - content - to regular Ardas, complete with Valar and everything, but it's spread out across several planets and they're lower-magic and much higher-tech. I think I mentioned they can duplicate themselves? Do you have like - fictional concepts or possibly actual magic of people being able to be condensed into information and, I don't know, run on crystal balls or anything like that -?"

"No but I can follow the - idea - sounds really dangerous -"

"It is. But a bunch of people there decided they wanted there to be more of them so now there are four of Space You and various numbers of other Space Persons. The yous were going by letters of the alphabet, it was terrible, Loki complained and got her Maitimo that being the name of the eldest cousin-you-don't-have to name them all things that were less terrible. Your name doesn't match your alts so it'll do on its own for the time being, I guess."

"Good, I'd be reluctant to change it. Higher tech meaning - science fantasy stuff -"

"...is science fantasy stuff like 'spaceships and science working right and so on'?"

"Yes."

"You may reasonably summarize Space Arda as Science Fantasy Arda. I mean, science works in the other Ardas too but they get from place to place in boats or on horses or whatever instead, so."

"And in the science fantasy Arda they have - spaceships and non-magic flight and so on-"

"Yes they do. First thing they wanted me to do when I showed up was make spaceships so they could get from one planet to another planet so they could help with the war."

"Cool. 

That leaves this patch of worlds -" gesturing at Stork and its neighbors -

"Yeah! Okay, Stork's weird. Its magic system is called servantmaking and there's five ways to make 'servants' that then do what whoever made them wants; these can be mechanical or magically animated or patches of light or literal animals. People don't reproduce there. Instead babies appear in random wilderness locations. People find them, or, since my alt there invented stork golems, the stork golems find them and bring them to population centers. They don't do parenting, even adoptive parenting - not as a social institution, anyway, now and then smaller numbers of people than 'the entire staff of a creche' will have a few kids in a non-apprenticeship context but by default no. My alt there is currently named Kib; in his past life he was a girl and named Aly. Reincarnation works sort of like alts except when a new incarnation is about fifteen they start getting dreams of their past life - waking memories past age fourish only, a few hours a night - and the dreams slot into place as memories once they wake up. So, when Kib was not yet clear that this was a genuine phenomenon, that Aly had existed and been him and so on, he got eaten by a snake monster from here," tap, "we're not totally sure how it got into Stork, maybe they're cannibals or something, anyway the kind of monster lands you in an adjacent world when it eats you and he landed in Shine, his Arda. He got there earlier than any of us - the Ardas are all on different schedules."

"...yeah, okay, that's weird."

"Yup. What ratio of social gossip to history-of-war-and-stuff do you want here -?"

"...I won't deny I'm curious, but it's entirely 'curious', can't think why it'd be necessary for helping find a you if there is one or getting a sense of the world beyond our planes..."

"I actually find 'how alts work' to be one of the things it's most useful to have a sense of for figuring out the worlds thing but yeah, I'll keep it concise. So Kib shows up and the you is as usual dating the Maitimo and they both crush on him and wind up in an adorable triad and then Kib belatedly dreams that Aly was married. Aly died young, her husband is still alive."

"Oh dear. Okay."

"Yep. Fortunately Kib landed early enough that it was peacetime and the Valar had by the occasion of this dream been prevailed upon to do something actually useful! There were Shine-to-Stork portals! Kib went and found his husband, Aydanci - also a one-off, no alts - and the husband said he could keep his boyfriends and that was fine and they all went back to Valinor and all was well until Melkor murdered Aydanci and destroyed the shiny trees most Ardas use in place of suns and went back to being openly evil. He'd been on parole, see, because the Valar."

"Gods," he agrees.

"Yep. So they found Aydanci reincarnated - most people on Stork don't reincarnate, they're not sure why the two of them, but Aydanci did - and gave him to a nice set of Elf parents and went to war, heavily aided and abetted by servantmaking. It is fairly typical in these wars for Maitimos to get captured by Melkors - that happened - it is not typical for Bells to, but that happened the once and it was here so if you meet Kib and he's a little off that's why. But between Aydanci-grown-up-again and the alt of your uncle they put together something that can kill a Melkor. The continent collapsed, but he's good and dead, and it runs on things that don't stop working out-of-neighborhood. I was planning to find the runaway Melkor, go fetch the items in question, and drop them on him."